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I've run into a company that had a HD fail with approximately $2 million in information/account information lost. We simply called up http://www.drivesavers.com/ and they were able to recover it within a few days for under $2,000.

DriveSavers or even slave it and buy a license and use ZeroAssumption Recovery or something. I think they overshot the solution and made way more work for themselves at a way higher cost.

captcha: expert

Anyway, what DIDN'T shock me about this story is that after formatting the main disk, the tech immediately (and blissfully) formatted the backup as well. I've seen stuff like that happen like ten times. ("Oh, well, after I replaced the drive, I figured I should replace the backup tapes too, so we could have a fresh start, so I threw them out." or "I figured I should make a backup right away, so I over-wrote the good backup with the new, bad, data.") I don't want to blame the victim, but sometimes it's like the data wants to be destroyed at that point. My favorite was when someone added a second drive to an important source control server to do nightly drive to drive back-ups. Then, they stopped doing tape backups nightly and switched to weekly. Then, they forgot they disconnected a fan during the HDD installation (or it was accidently disconnected -- it remains a debated point), then the server fried itself and the drives. Then everyone lost a day of work rebuilding the source archive based on their local data. Good times.

er.. umm... then again .. physical destructon of teh drive is also not guaranteed... check out http://www.drivesavers.com/
check out their gallerry of horrors stories...

Way back in the day (early/mid 1980s) I did a job like this.

Person A left company AA and started company BB then started taking customers. Attorney for AA got a court order allowing inspection of all magnetic media. Of course, by the time I was allowed access to the drive, several months had passed during which time "something had gone wrong with the computer" and "I think the repair shop had to format one of the drives". Yeah, right.

In any case, they thought that a basic reformat of a DOS hard-disk removed all the data. As I started pulling off and saving directory-fragments and disk sectors which showed that they had illegally installed specialized and unusual software belonging to the former employer as well as lists of names of clients they made fundamental mistake #2 - they started blabbing "explanations" for the data I was recovering. As a former law-enforcement employee I simply listened attentively to their stories...and included the additional incriminating evidence in my report.

Never even had to go to court and testify.

Things are more complicated, today. You are right to get a computer forensic expert involved. Many of the disk-recovery services like Drivesavers provide forensic services in addition to data-recovery.

Yes, you can fix some hardware problems by cooling the electronics. Now, this would be silly if the user accidently deleted the files and then froze the drive to undelete them. Otherwise, this can be a reasonable approach, even if it sounds silly to a BBC journalist.

Going to a professional recovery service immediately without mucking about is much better, but the expense of the data needs to outweight the cost of the recovery.

These hardware died brutally, but the harddrives were saved

btw -the last previous story on SlashDot on abused hardware was here in March '03 . It's good to see updated coverage...especially in an election year.

www.drivesavers.com

Take a look at these and say that again.

It's These Guys.

When a windows java exploit can reformat your disk by visiting a malformed web page, you don't really have to wonder why they're so popular.

Everyone who I've ever heard from who has used DriveSavers has been delighted. Their Hall of Fame is pretty fun too.

Everyone who I've ever heard from who has used DriveSavers has been delighted. Their Hall of Fame is pretty fun too.

Nothing is better than a recent, working and complete backup ... but a few days ago, i saw an advertisement from a firm (DriveSavers) they are specialised in data-recovery for destroyed harddisks, maybe they can help!

Besides, i suppose it would be best to see the positive side of that incident, i'm sure it will be a good experience rebuilding the network! Anyway, good luck to you ...

If you want to reconsider a professional data recovery choice, try Drivesavers. I've seen them in various computer publications and they seem to be pretty honest, but I have never used their services so I'm not sure.

Searching C|Net Downloads I found Recover98 which seems to be the best package there. It costs $169 to register, which provides access to all features, and support for Windows 2000 dynamic drives(Software RAID arrays), NTFS 5, and it's really small. Again, I haven't tested it, but it looks decent. The trial has save features partly disabled but you can at least see if it looks good, and it is certainly cheaper than a professional data recovery service.

I haven't had the (mis?)fortune of using an IBM hard drive since my 12.5GB one in an older system of mine. Are there any thoughts of a class-action lawsuit based on the drives' failure to perform properly? If new drives are failing this often, there is a definate problem.

JKoebel

I'm also not sure that the platters wouldn't survive, giving services like DriveSavers something to work with.

-Sean